When you’re an Oscar-winning director, you can go to the movies and walk out with your next project. That reportedly happened for Danny Boyle, who saw Havana Marking‘s 2013 documentary Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers and immediately decided he wanted to turn it into a narrative. So that’s what he’s going to do.

The documentary tells the behind the scenes story of the world’s most successful jewel thieves and the underground world of the international drug trade. Pathe and Fox Searchlight will co-finance the remake. Read More »

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Briefly:Danny Boyle has done a bit of television over the course of his career (especially if you count that little foray with the 2012 Summer Olympics) and now he’s prepping to make his biggest foray into the medium. Boyle has signed with Channel 4 in the UK to make Babylon, a “police drama” that will be “set in the world of modern policing.”

We don’t know much more about the show than that, but it will be written by Sam Bains and Jesse Armstrong (of the series Peep Show) and the pilot will be exec produced by Robert Jones. The pilot will shoot later this year, with a planned 2014 air date for the show. [Broadcast, via The Playlist]

In case you were wondering, yes, Kevin Smith is still pretty sure Clerks III will be his best film ever. It’s not clear whether Rosario Dawson totally agrees with that sentiment, but apparently she wants in too. Also after the jump:

Danny Boyle‘s latest film, Trance, is a victim of its own ingenuity. It’s a film about memory and how a person is defined by their memories. These memories can be tampered with, removed, replaced, even changed ever so slightly to make reality seem different than it actually is. To bolster those ideas, Boyle gives the film a lurid feel. At any given time, the audience isn’t sure if what they are seeing is real, fake, a dream, a memory or some blending of both.

Unfortunately, that ambiguity begins to overpower any interest generated for the characters or story, leaving the film with a cold feeling. There are certainly mysteries to be solved, and Boyle’s energetic style provides some fun moments, but if you can’t believe what you’re seeing at any given moment, you can’t begin to care about the characters either. Read More »

Danny Boyle has spoken at length about his disinterest in big-budget franchise filmmaking, but in case there was any confusion, he’s reiterating once again that he has no interest in making a Bond film. “They’re not really for me,” he asserted in a recent interview.

Nor is he eager to delve into the comic book world — as a movie director, that is. As a movie fan, he’s looking forward in particular to Josh Trank‘s Fantastic Four, having “loved” Chronicle. Hit the jump to read his comments.

The latest trailer for Danny Boyle‘s Trance can’t beat the earlier red-band one in terms of sex and violence, but it doesn’t need to. It looks plenty dark and twisted and bizarre as is.

The trippy thriller centers on Simon (James McAvoy), a fine art auctioneer who assists in the theft of a stolen painting. When he can’t remember where he stashed the stolen loot, the gang leader (Vincent Cassel) hires a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) to help jog his memory. As she delves deeper and deeper into his mind, reality begins to unravel. Hit the jump to check out the trailer.

There are directors who seem to work solely in massive studio productions, and others that seem determined to stick with intimate indie-style flicks. Danny Boyle falls into the latter, though he says it’s not due to a distaste for the former. “I love watching those movies,” he insists. Nor is it that he can’t see the appeal. In fact, he flirted with the idea of directing Alien 4 many years ago.

Nowadays, he’s comfortable with the knowledge that $200 million pictures aren’t for him, and not even a franchise like James Bond can get him to change his mind. At a recent 92YTribeca event in New York City, Boyle divulged his thoughts on big-budget filmmaking, the Bond series, his brush with Alien, and more. Hit the jump to keep reading.

For a long time now, Trainspotting director Danny Boyle has wanted to bring the cast of that film back together to make a new film, based on Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh‘s novel Porno. The idea is to pick up with the surviving Trainspotting characters ten years on, and Boyle has discussed his desire to make the film when the actors have aged appropriately. (Allowing that actors are perhaps better taken care of than their characters in the film, he needed a more significant interval than a single decade.)

Now, as Boyle’s new film Trance is about to be released, he says that he thinks he can get the Trainspotting cast back together to shoot the film in 2016. Read More »